I don't think He(?)'s a swallow, I'm guessing some kind of eagle, perhaps with a feather-loss problem. I was wondering if Wesley thought he might be amenable to training, as he seems quite friendly. (he seems particularly interested in anyone sunbathing.) I thought I might call him Eric.

The nice birdie in the picture is likely either a Griffin Vulture or close relative.

As for the sunbathers, consider that motionless people without inconvenient wrappings might be of inherent interest to a vulture.

As for training, it might be done, but I sure wouldn't want to be the guy to do it. Other vultures are known for regurgitating stomach contents all over anything they deem a threat. I suspect that you'd have the same problem with a vulture, though, that you do for an osprey... even if you man them and train them to come to you, once they are loose, there is basically nothing that you can provide for them that they want. An osprey nails a fish target 19 times out of 20, and vultures don't exactly have a problem in obtaining "prey" once spotted. For red-tailed hawks going after rabbits, the success rate is more like 1 time in 20 attempts, so a falconer can well improve things by providing a reliable food source.

sometimes the After the Bar Closes page mentions a new post, but upon clicking the thread, you don't get the new post. I've had the delay last as long as 15 minutes. Anybody else get this or know what's going on? Manually refreshing doesn't fix it.

update: a little more data on the problem. I was seeing

Quote

Pages: (29) < ... 25 26 27 28 [29] >

, and seeing 29 pages, and after 30 minutes, when it finally showed me the new comments, they were on a new page, page 30. So apparently page 30 existed for a while, but didn't immediately show up either on the front board or when you hit ">".

sometimes the After the Bar Closes page mentions a new post, but upon clicking the thread, you don't get the new post. I've had the delay last as long as 15 minutes. Anybody else get this or know what's going on? Manually refreshing doesn't fix it.

update: a little more data on the problem. I was seeing

Quote

Pages: (29) < ... 25 26 27 28 [29] >

, and seeing 29 pages, and after 30 minutes, when it finally showed me the new comments, they were on a new page, page 30. So apparently page 30 existed for a while, but didn't immediately show up either on the front board or when you hit ">".

I'll corroborate this. Yesterday I had two duplicate posts because of this bug. It turned out the first post was at the top of the next page and Steve's query here shows me there really was some problem.

Steve after several minutes of closing windows, resetting cookies, and logging in/out, I eventually restarted my computer and that seemed to let me into the next page. Although by that point other posters had dropped comments and I don't know that it wasn't those that kicked the system into letting me onto the next page rather than my restart.

--------------"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."-John F. Kennedy

sometimes the After the Bar Closes page mentions a new post, but upon clicking the thread, you don't get the new post. I've had the delay last as long as 15 minutes. Anybody else get this or know what's going on? Manually refreshing doesn't fix it.

update: a little more data on the problem. I was seeing

Quote

Pages: (29) < ... 25 26 27 28 [29] >

, and seeing 29 pages, and after 30 minutes, when it finally showed me the new comments, they were on a new page, page 30. So apparently page 30 existed for a while, but didn't immediately show up either on the front board or when you hit ">"

The problem seems to arise when comments flow onto a new page. I've had the delay be as long as an hour or two, but eventually the new comments do show up.

It seems to be only the "AF Dave's UPDATED Creator God Hypothesis" thread that has this problem. Maybe God has a problem with Dave's hypothesis?

--------------2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity

"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams

that st=1200 part means throw away the first 1200 comments, and don't show any comments higher than 1230. If there have been 1202 comments on the thread, and you click on the link and it has st=1200, you get a page with only comments 1201 and 1202 on them. sometimes, whatever updates the page 41 / 1200 numbers doesn't kick in after the next thirty comments, and in this for instance, you'll see, on the AtBC page, a link going to page 40 (st=1170) even though there've now been over thirty comments past comment 1170. So you see only comments 1170-1200, even though you've already seen them. So the solution is this--if you know there are updated comments beyond what it's showing you, go to the last page it will give you. click on the URL in that field of the browser, and manually add thirty to the number. In this case, you'd change

Yeah, and it doesn't just have to be Mod 30. You can throw away any number of comments you want. Me, I'm using an old computer, and it's a little slow, so sometimes I'll calibrate based on the reply number, for instance, if there've been 1245 replies, and I think I've only missed the last few, I'll modify the link to "T=1238" replies, and only have to wait for the last 7 replies to load. It's very comprehensible, whereas some content systems aren't.

t=1200 doesn't mean throw away the first 1200 comments. It actually means throw away the first 1199 comments. The first page only shows 29 comments, because it contains the original post. So the 30th reply is the first thing you see on the second page, and so on.